Clairin World Championship 2017 – The Spirit of Haiti.
Haiti is the last rum frontier and “Clairin” is the native rum. No one before Velier had ever discovered the inconceivable: there are now 49 running distilleries in the entire Caribbean and no less than 532 in Haiti alone!
Small craft distilleries are scattered throughout the only Caribbean country that rebelled against slavery in 1804 and was shown the red card by the Western world. Today, Haiti is the only country that remains wonderfully “pure” with its original species of un-hybridised sugar cane, chemical-free farming, spontaneous fermentation with no yeasts, and archaic unfiltered distillation.
Unexplored and surprising aromaticity, not only for cane distillates, they are the only natural rums in the world! Haiti began as Cinderella and became a Princess!
Producers are everywhere, often in the middle of the sugar cane fields, mills in wood, stills and fermentation vats that are usually made of oak or mango. For many reasons, due to the lack of industrialisation, processes are still ancestral and it should be considered the best cane spirit possible.
The styles of the three producers selected by Velier are the true expressions of four different ‘terroir’. Their four Clairin are always quite different batch per batch, as all natural product. Clairin is the only natural rhum in the world.
Clairin is an artisanal sugarcane spirit, or rhum agricole, made from sugar cane juice with the exception of Clairin Le Rocher, which is made from sugar syrup.
Similar to Mezcal, the process of making it is:
- entirely organic and pesticide free;
- hand cut, native grown sugarcane;
- spontaneous fermentation with no added yeasts
- once distilled in fire or steam heated pot stills to bottling proof
Clairin is raw, flavourful, and as an all-natural spirit it is different from batch to batch, and is truly handmade the way it has been for the last 200 years.
